Among Michael Pollan’s memories of his time at Chez Panisse – the Californian restaurant founded by Alice Waters and a pioneer of the farm-to-table philosophy – there is no elaborate dish, but simply a bowl of ripe peaches.
Summer, in our kitchens just as in Alice Waters’s, reminds us precisely of this lesson. There are ingredients that simply ask to be chosen well, cut up and served. A ripe tomato, a peach, a few basil leaves. When many recipes are stripped back to their essentials, we can finally notice all the things that normally go unnoticed in our relationship with food.
Room for rituals - WHAT RECIPES DON’T TELL YOU
Recipes list ingredients, quantities and cooking times.
Recipes list ingredients, quantities and cooking times. They rarely tell us about everything else.
They don’t tell of the moment when we open the fridge without yet knowing what to make, the return home with bags full of shopping from the Saturday morning market, the worktop filling up bit by bit, or the act of tasting an ingredient before we’ve even decided how to use it.
Yet it is precisely in these moments that cooking comes to life.
Recipes describe the result.
The actions tell the rest of the story.
Today, we tell the story of these actions in a different way.
Today, we tell the story of these actions in a different way. Books, magazines and series such as *The Bear* devote less and less space to the recipe itself and more and more to what comes before it: the choice of ingredients, the preparation, the organisation of the space, the waiting time. It is as though the real story is no longer just the final dish.
But everything that happens before.
If we now look more closely at what a recipe doesn’t tell us, then the way we imagine a kitchen changes too. It is no longer enough for it to be efficient. It must accommodate different ways of preparing, organising and experiencing food, because no two people really follow the same steps, even when starting from the same recipe.
Valdesign kitchens are born of this very same attention to detail. Continuous worktops, cooking islands and storage systems are not designed merely to organise the space, but to give shape to everything that happens even before a dish reaches the table. Because a well-designed kitchen does not dictate how we should cook: it lets everyone find their own way of doing so.
